January 27, 2005

CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) has launched a worldwide boycott of Tesco in response to the retailer's escalating use of RFID on consumer products. CASPIAN Founder and Director Katherine Albrecht made the announcement to millions of viewers watching BBC Newsnight, the popular UK news program, on Tuesday.

Tesco is the world's third largest retailer, with over 2,300 stores across Europe and Asia.

RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, a controversial technology that hooks miniature antennas up to tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track items at a distance. The technology raises privacy concerns because RFID tagged items can be monitored invisibly right through items consumers normally consider private, like clothing, purses, backpacks and wallets.

During the BBC segment, Albrecht outlined CASPIAN member objections to Tesco's expansion of its item-level RFID tagging trials, saying they "would involve potentially hundreds of thousands more shoppers....it essentially means that more people will be taking home items containing [RFID] spychips." She concluded, "that's simply unacceptable."

Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason said Tesco was taking the announcement of the boycott "seriously," and read a prepared statement from the retailer that was intended to assure consumers that the store did not have plans to track products after purchase.

Mason concluded that "all the big names in this [RFID] industry will be watching this battle very intently."[...]

CASPIAN has launched http://www.boycottTesco.com in conjunction with its boycott announcement. The site details Tesco's RFID involvement, including its past misconduct with the controversial Gillette RFID "smart shelf."

Albrecht vows to maintain the boycott until Tesco complies with the moratorium on item-level RFID tagging of consumer goods as outlined in a position statement endorsed by CASPIAN and over 40 of the world's leading privacy and civil liberties organizations. [...]

"We believe Tesco's decision to pursue item-level RFID tagging is irresponsible," Albrecht added. "We're calling on consumers to boycott the chain until the practice is stopped. If people must shop at Tesco, we are asking them to reduce their purchases. After all, as Tesco says, 'every little helps.'"

I am happy to announce that KeyTone Technologies, Inc. based in Santa Clara, CA has developed a RFID SDK toolkit targeted towards the developer community.

This .NET based RFID SDK™ is an easy-to-use toolkit, which empowers software developers to rapidly design, develop, and test RFID applications. Developers can build device independent applications using common APIs and its integrated device simulation environment.
The common APIs of the RFID SDK accelerates application development by:
•Eliminating the need to learn RFID device specific programming.
•Filtering and aggregating large amounts of raw data generated by RFID devices including ALE compliance from EPC Global.
•Transformation of the RFID data using industry encoding standards (EPC, DOD, and others).
•Providing web services to integrate RFID data with the enterprise.